Social Media tools like blogs, wikis and social networking sites are providing new opportunities for us to connect and interact with each other. Many social theories that could once be researched only by conducting expensive surveys can now be studied and modeled due to the easy availability of large scale social annotations and explicit description of social relationships online. The rate at which blogs, videos, bookmarks and many other user generated content is growing presents several interesting research and data management questions. The opportunity to mine social media content for analyzing opinions, sentiments and trend identification has several applications in Web search, personalization, business intelligence and national security. This special issue of the International Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases invites original research contributions on data management in social media. Topics include but are not restricted to the following.

Manuscripts must be submitted by January 15, 2009 and should not exceed 25 pages in length. Authors will be notified by April 15 and camera ready copy will be due May 15. Submit papers online specifying article type S.I.: Data Management for the Social Web. For more information, see the cfp flier or contact Anupam Joshi at joshi@cs.umbc.edu.